The new Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles has inspired several descriptors, including cheese grater. The $140 million building houses the art collection of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. (The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro)

Architecture review

Broad appeal

A cinematic museum for downtown Los Angeles

The locals in Los Angeles have taken to calling it a cheese grater, and its architects alternately describe it as a sponge and a piece of coral, but feel free to choose your own metaphor. Egg crate? Spaceship? Perhaps a Hollywood star, primped for the red carpet? It’s hard to resist the impulse to label it.

The new Broad Museum, an antic block-size box articulated by more than 2,500 concrete modules, is the kind of building that demands your attention and presses the imagination.

That it does so without descending into the kind of pointless self-indulgence that plagues so much form-driven “starchitecture” is a testament to Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the visionary New Yorkers who will forever be introduced as the architects of the remade High Line. That project made them celebrities, or what passes for such in the architecture world, with a catalog of major projects including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the renovation of New York’s Lincoln Center. The firm is at work on campus buildings for Berkeley, Columbia and Stanford and an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As the playful response to it suggests, Angelenos have thus far embraced the Broad building and its decidedly East Coast architects. There remains, however, a deep well of skepticism within the city’s intelligentsia as to the motivations of its patrons, Eli and Edythe Broad, philanthropic heavyweights who have shifted allegiances from institution to institution, often leaving havoc in their wake, and their names in bold print. Their namesake $140 million museum houses their prodigious personal collection, some 2,000 works primarily from the postwar era.

The makeup of that collection, which is relatively light on California artists and heavy on art stars such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, is grounds alone for a certain level of reservation. Speaking to the press at the museum’s opening, Eli Broad suggested this opus stood as a reflection of the art world’s political engagement over the last half-century, which seemed a dubious claim on inspection. While every personal collection is inherently idiosyncratic, the works at the Broad seem more a physical index of art market value than any clear-eyed curatorial vision — and certainly not a political one.

Liz Diller

This disappointment is leavened by the fact that the work is undeniably blue chip and open to the public at no charge. Institutionally, the museum stands as a victory for LA’s increasingly resurgent downtown arts district, once forlorn but now blossoming into a vibrant urban center. “Over time I have become less ironic and more earnest that there can be a pedestrian downtown,” says architect Liz Diller.

The Broad should only contribute to that movement. It is attentive to the street, its skirt hitched up at the corners to invite in passers-by, and it is respectful, if not deferential, to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, the anarchic flower of titanium that is its next-door neighbor along Grand Avenue. One might even think of it as an inversion of Gehry’s building; the Broad, by way of contrast, is rigidly orthogonal on its exterior, but opens up on its ground floor into an interior of organic, cavelike forms.

The form of the building is a response to the program of the museum, which required that the building act as both a secure warehouse for the collection as well as a public gallery. The architects responded with a “vault and veil” system, in which a three-story box (the vault) with 21,000 square feet of storage capped by a 35,000-square-foot gallery is blanketed by a structurally independent sun shade (the veil).

That veil, composed of modules of glass-reinforced concrete formed from 380 different molds, controls light entering the building and is animated on its front facade by a puddlelike glazed indentation, a Cyclopean eye that marks a small theater on the second floor. The entire composition is anchored at only three points, which gives this building a surprising feeling of lightness, unusual for a structure of concrete, which is so often stigmatized as brutal and dull. Here the architects have leveraged its malleability to create something that is both delicate and energetic.

A diagram shows the Broad’s veil-and-vault structural system, with a structurally independent facade and roof blanketed over the building. (The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro)

That continues, in a sense, below ground, where the veil is stabilized by a 32-ton rocker beam that will allow it to sway gently (and safely) during a seismic event. The whole sits on a multideck parking garage — this is still Los Angeles, after all. Originally the architects had envisioned that the building would be fronted by a carport with valet drop-off, a decision that thankfully hit the drafting room floor.

As it is, visitors slip under the veil, through a shaded arcade that separates it from the glass wall of the museum proper, and into a block-long lobby that is a pleasingly dim gray monotone. It is a welcome shift from the Technicolor streets of Los Angeles, a liminal space where the mind can prepare for an engagement with works that make their own considerable demands.

Certainly it is an unusual space, with walls of Venetian plaster that gently swoop in and out. Passing through is inherently cinematic — appropriately so, for a museum in Hollywood — and that sense is only augmented by the flight up to the third-floor galleries on a 105-foot, three-story escalator. The experience is the closest thing you will find in a museum to a ride on Disney’s Space Mountain.

If this journey is not futuristic enough, there is also a cylindrical glass elevator that slips up and down through the core of the building. Either way, visitors are deposited in a magnificent open space, an acre-size room unencumbered by columns. Overhead are the zigzagging modules of the veil, each with an oculus facing to the north, and each independently controlled to optimize light conditions for whatever might be on display. Hidden within the 7-foot depth of the honeycomb are five crossbeams, each 190 feet wide, that lend structural support to the open interior.

That space, with its 23-foot ceilings, would be more majestic if properly curated; as it is, exhibition walls block every attempt to see across the full extent of the space. It would also be useful if the space were not so unrelentingly monochromatic. Gray concrete floors, white walls, white veil: The eye tires easily in such an environment. And though the light generally shows works to good advantage, a lack of contrast saps some works of vibrancy — Ellsworth Kelly’s color-field paintings, for instance, seem duller than normal in this context.

Slideshow: A look at The Broad museum

An aerial view of the white box that is the Broad in downtown Los Angeles. Next door is Frank Gehry’s titanium Walt Disney Concert Hall. (The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro)

A sectional diagram of the Broad illustrates the placement of lobby, storage and galleries. (The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro)

The columnless third-floor gallery is an acre in size. Five hidden crossbeams, each 190-feet long, hold the modular ceiling in place. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

Works by art stars including Jeff Koons define the Broad collection. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

The trip up the Broad’s escalator culminates with a view of the gallery’s honeycomb ceiling. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

The Broad’s stairwell spills into the organic, curvaceous space of the lobby. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

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Another gallery, on the first floor, offers an additional 15,000 square feet of space, in a warren of rooms far more subdued than those on the third floor.

Throughout, the building is immaculate in its construction and detailing, which has not always been the case with these architects. Diller and Ric Scofidio, who are married (Charles Renfro joined the partnership later), spent their early careers in academia, their considerable influence on the profession driven by speculative projects and conceptual installations rather than experience with the complexities of actual building. The cover of their first monograph, “Flesh: Architectural Probes,” featured the book’s title provocatively stamped into a woman’s derrière.

“Architects said these guys aren’t architects, and artists said these guys aren’t artists,” says Scofidio. “Some of our first projects were very academic and limited in who they could reach.”

Their shift toward accessibility was first prominently realized with the Blur Building, a crowd-pleasing pavilion for the Swiss Expo in 2002. Set on a scaffold over Lac de Neuchâtel, it generated a mist so dense that to enter it was akin to walking through a cloud. With the High Line, they have created a spectacle whose very popularity undermines the experience of visiting it.

(Left) A cylindrical glass elevator would be appropriate for a sci-fi film. (Middle) The Broad lobby, dim and cavelike, marks a dramatic shift from the bright Los Angeles street. (Right) The 23-foot ceilings comfortably accommodate even large contemporary works. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

The Broad is itself no slouch in the spectacle department and otherwise engages many of the themes that have preoccupied the architects throughout their career, in particular the subjects of movement, transparency and surveillance. “A lot of our buildings are choreographed,” says Scofidio.

The Broad, defined by the contradictory requirements to serve as both a vault and gallery, fits neatly into their intellectual trajectory and seems ideally representative of an age defined by obsessive need for security and compulsive immersion in social media. It is a building that demands to be looked at — and photographed and posted to online feeds in any number of apps — but is just as assuredly looking out from behind its concrete veil, carefully monitoring and orchestrating activity.

That dialectic is explicitly dramatized within the building. A winding stairwell cascades from the third-floor gallery down to the ground floor, a dark artery dramatically illuminated by lighting concealed in narrow troughs that run along the edges of the concrete treads. On landings invariably backed up with camera-toting visitors are trapezoidal windows with views into the storage vault. One can easily imagine it as a set in a sci-fi thriller, or better yet a caper film.

That the Broad really only accommodates these two functions, looking and storing, is perhaps its greatest virtue. As Diller notes, “It was not burdened by other programs.” That is, there is no restaurant within the walls of the building, no roof terrace with 360-degree views. The shop is a small affair, tastefully sequestered in a lobby that seems ill-suited to corporate events. A lawn outside can accommodate some of those functions, and that’s fine. A museum should be, first and foremost, a place for art. The Broad is, undeniably, that.

Mark Lamster is a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture.